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September 17, 2007God didn’t drop the atom bomb; but neither did Nature.
We are surrounded by the unfathomable; but we turn that into a routine. We change infinity into a tube ticket. That is the human condition. We are ignorant that we are ignorant. Then comes the blow, war, which demonstrates this ignorance by its discovery of absence. How neither God nor Nature is present.
I am saying that this is the human condition; that this is what we keep confronting in human affairs; that this is the precipitate of human experience; that this is the substance of our history as a species: the slow but persistent repeated discovery that we don’t ‘fit’ anywhere. That we are not made to fit anywhere somehow. Each new political order is predicated on the idea that we are but that (natural) hubris is preordained to fail, to discover our smallness, our insignificance, our meaninglessness, again.
What is a human being therefore?
Tags: Homelessness, Infinity, The Bomb
November 3, 2007 at 1:23 pm
This seems to be a really accurate objectification of the human condition. For me, however, the answer is God. I’m not sure what your overall world view is (I just came across this post under the ‘infinity’ tag), but, for me our beauty and hope is found by realizing almost exactly what you communicated in this post - that there is a human misconception about human potential. For me, once I realized how futile my life had been and how helpless I was to “fix it,” I found peace.
A couple of critical quotes from author Brennan Manning:
“I have lived long enough to appreciate that Christianity is lived more in the valley than on the mountaintop, that faith is never doubt-free, and that although God has revealed Himself in creation and in history, the surest way to know God is, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, as tamquam ignotum, as utterly unknowable. No thought can contain Him, no word can express Him; He is beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine.”
“To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.”
Thanks for the post.
November 3, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Grace, thanks for that. We live in what seems to be a mundane world but perhaps it isn’t. I was brought up a strict Catholic, and as a result - it seems - I think God exists; even though I do not practice any religious belief, I feel a loyalty to God. I think this where we intersect. Essentially my interest in the human condition is philosophical. I have tried to suggest what it might mean to look at things in this way, in pages, in the short note on my interests.